Multifunctional micelle delivery system for overcoming multidrug resistance of doxorubicin

Abstract

Doxorubicin (DOX), as an anthracycline, plays an important role in chemotherapy. But multidrug resistance (MDR) tremendously retards the anticancer effect of DOX and results in the failure of chemotherapy. Multifunctional micelles emerge as a valid strategy to load DOX by physical encapsulation or chemical binding to be delivered to cancer cells against MDR. In this review, mechanism of MDR of DOX is simply described. Multifunctional co-delivery micelles of DOX and main MDR modulators have been summarised in detail. DOX-loaded multifunctional polymeric micelles are also introduced to alleviate MDR of DOX, in which polymers act as MDR modulators.

Keywords:

• Multifunctional micelles
• multidrug resistance
• doxorubicin
• tumour targeting
• polymer

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

We are grateful to financial support from National Natural Science Foundation of China (81202480, 81302723), Natural Science Foundation of Liaoning Province (2015020749).